Volume 19, Issue 3 - The visage as text: physiognomy, semiotics, and face reading from antiquity to artificial intelligence; Guest Editors: Remo Gramigna and Massimo Leone

This brief text introduces the main themes and topics of this collection of articles on “The visage as text: physiognomy, semiotics, and face reading from antiquity to artificial intelligence,” emphasizing the historical continuity of interest in the face as a surface to be scrutinized, investigated, and studied in order to know the individual’s intimacy or future. It points out the intertwining of semeiotic knowledge, which aims at capturing clues in the face to determine a patient’s state of health, and semiotics, which systematizes these inferences within the framework of the circumstantial paradigm. The introduction concludes by pointing out how the new digital technologies of the face are reviving and problematizing anew the semiotic interest in physiognomy understood not as a scientific discipline but as a field of sign attention directed at the face.

Physiognomy finds itself in a strange position. On the one hand, it is considered false and even dangerous by common sense as a pseudo-scientific theory; on the other hand, it is implicitly practiced by everyone every day (Brandt 1980. Face reading. The persistence of physiognomy. Psychology Today 14(7). 90–96). This situation calls for an explanation. After a brief discussion of the problems of classical physiognomic theories, I will show how they embody the equational model of the sign and how this perspective helps in the understanding of why physiognomy have proved to be false. I will then introduce two recent articles by Dumouchel (2022. Making faces. Topoi 41. 631–639) and Crippen and Rolla (2022. Faces and situational agency. Topoi 41. 659–670) that address the perception of faces from a situated and ecological point of view. I will argue that these theories embody the inferential model of the sign, thus paving the way for a new science of the face.

Within the interdisciplinary context of the nineteenth century, the paper scrutinizes the relation between Paolo Marzolo’s theory of signs and Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological-criminal approach. Best known for his unfinished work Monumenti storici (1847–1866), Marzolo (of whom Lombroso calls himself a disciple) investigates, in his last Saggio sui segni (1866), the origin and development of languages by combining the positivist approach with an eighteenth-century encyclopedic Enlightenment perspective, as well as the earlier anatomist tradition. In his view, the human production, learning, and use of signs, resting upon sensory experiences and mnemonic activity, involves the process of imitation with a pivotal role of the speakers’ phonic, gestural, and facial expressions (i.e., physiognomy), related to geographical, linguistic, and anthropological differences among human individuals, as well as the cultural element of civilization. Conceived as case(s) of semiotic ideology rooted between linguistics and medicine, the Marzolo–Lombroso filiation shows an increasing correlation between race, language, and climate in the wake of social Darwinism and akin to other coeval physiognomic theories. In Lombroso’s perspective, a radical translation from a linguistic and phonic-semiotic field to an anthropological and somatic-semiotic plane seems inevitable, emphasizing the (para) scientific flavor and widening the gap between anthropometric and ethnoanthropological approaches.

The paper examines the origins of physiognomy through analysis of the work of one of its founding fathers, Cesare Lombroso. The most interesting facet of Lombroso’s studies on the criminal face is how it can be considered as a true semeiotics. Although the Italian doctor’s supposed discoveries cannot be defined as scientific, his quantitative approach constitutes an important case study, since he tries to establish pertinences between facial features and criminal subjects’ features. It can be observed how Lombroso’s approach and theories are actually within a particular rationale that semiotics of culture can clarify from the perspective of the way in which specific facial features become commonly shared stereotypes.

In the late 1870s, Galton implements and describes the technique of “composite photography.” This technique consists in overlapping several images of faces on the same photographic plate to obtain what Galton calls a “generic face.” The idea of composite photography appears in some of the crucial junctures of Peirce’s semiotic theory. Peirce uses the composite photograph as the image of the percept to explain how the “general” is a schema through which we organize the perceived. The paper shows how Peirce’s use of the metaphor of composite photography is linked to the question of the “embodiment” of the general.

This manuscript begins with a brief introduction that establishes the theoretical background, followed by a tripartite unfolding that explains the following contents: 1) the path from point zero as a plurimorphic space of semiotic tranquility; 2) the historical trajectory of physiognomy and pathognomy suggestions; and 3) new biometric readings and the digital face. We postulate the neutral state of the face and see a possible manifestation of it in the tranquility illustration and theorization by Le Brun. Together with the passive face recounted by Magli, these are some of the static aspects of that space called the face, full of signs that write and compose it and allow its physiognomic reading. Degree zero, the pre-signal null point from which interpretation originates, determines the semiotic potential of the face, and the expressions of the emotions become the key to pathognomy studies, in their historical-cultural variants. We will then see how, in today’s highly technological and mediatized society, there are new biometric manifestations linked to the digital face. From the Bertillonage of the early 1900s, we conclude with a work of contemporary art that critically revisits the same approach.

To critically explicate the visual epistemology for catoptric autoexperimentation in the contemporary science of facial behavior, by way of its historical progenitors, I draw upon the pragmatic semiotics of the catoptric phenomenon. This problematization of catoptrics is fundamentally about two different but related concepts: the semiotic threshold and the iconicity debate. Based on primary sources both Western and Eastern, I trace a transcultural history of scientific ideas about performing catoptric auto-experimentation through privileged case studies from physiognomic literary corpora. I probe the ways in which self-recognition has long been pragmatically necessitated as well as processually normative in the study of the face, the research and development of optical technologies has in turn led to paradigm shifts in physiognomic thought, and the procatoptric staging behind the catoptric prosthesis conditions its visual epistemology. I propose that the catoptric prosthesis is not pre- but post-semiotic. That is, the mirror only becomes a mirror when part of a semiotic process and sign relation. The extreme of iconicity that is perceptually afforded by the catoptric prosthesis, far from disqualifying it from the status of a sign, is exactly what distinguishes its role and importance for this semiosis of the face.

Facial recognition technology has enabled governments and private companies to have control of millions of faces in different countries around the world. This becomes dangerous since it threatens the privacy of citizens, which is why different activists demonstrate against this form of control and surveillance using different technological and aesthetic resources to prevent said recognition. This work aims at showing how face concealment can be a powerful semiotic device that can slow down or divert facial recognition technology, configuring new physiognomies. We begin by characterizing the forms of concealment of the face in the contemporary digital age, and then we analyze, from a semiotic perspective, a particular case: the different types of makeup that Adam Harvey proposes so that faces cannot be recognized. The results of the investigation show how this form of face concealment that generates new physiognomies builds political senses of resistance against advanced technology that aims to identify, monitor, and control human faces.

The representation the model’s face in advertisements is a controversial issue for the Chinese. This article investigates the features and the origin of stereotypical Chinese eyes throughout history, highlighting the naturalization of the slanting eyes in the Western context. Through a short summary of preferable eyes in physiognomy, traditional painting, and modern China, the essay demonstrates the variation in perception of the beauty of eyes that differ from and are influenced by the West in both positive and negative aspects. The essay critiques the Orientalist portrayal of Chinese models by comparing the stereotypical slanting eyes and the admired phoenix eyes and conducting a semiotic analysis of Chen Man’s 2021 Dior photo. Furthermore, by adopting the Chinese concept of “face” ( lian / mianzi ) in the case of the Chinese brand Three Squirrels, the author proposes that the sensibility of the Chinese toward the model’s face is not only a historic problem related to national emotions but also a moral issue linked with collectivism, particularly in self-Orientalist cases. The Communist Party of China plays an active role in the construction of the moral discourse regarding the perception of the beauty of eyes, which may become another response to Orientalism.

This paper aims at confronting a semio-anthropology of the face, based on the principles of Lévi-Strauss and Greimas, with the representation of the visage in Japanese Nō theater. As a theory, semiotics permits an explanation of the signification of faces, reduced at first to a series of masks, and their representations in different cultures. Within this framework, we will show that representations of visages in Nō form a semiotic system specific to both Japanese culture (myths, legends) and theatrical performance, and that the latter reintroduces a dynamic dimension which questions their status. Initially described as “narrative masks” depicting characters, they finally emerge as “movement masks” that blur the boundary between mask and face even further.